this “wreck of matter and crush of worlds”—­reported itself to our planet in February, 1901, when a star of the twelfth magnitude suddenly blazed out as a star of the first magnitude and then slowly faded.  It was the grand finale of the independent existence of two enormous celestial bodies.  They apparently ended in dust that whirled away in the vast abyss of siderial space, blown by the winds upon which suns and systems drift as autumn leaves.  It would be quite in keeping with the observed ways of the Eternal, if these bodies had had worlds in their train, teeming with life, which met the same fate as the central colliding bodies.

Does not force as we know it in this world go its own way with the same disregard of the precious thing we call life?  Such long and patient preparations for it,—­apparently the whole stellar system in labor pains to bring it forth,—­and yet held so cheaply and indifferently in the end!  The small insect that just now alighted in front of my jack-plane as I was dressing a timber, and was reduced to a faint yellow stain upon the wood, is typical of the fate of man before the unregarding and unswerving terrestrial and celestial forces.  The great wheels go round just the same whether they are crushing the man or crushing the corn for his bread.  It is all one to the Eternal.  Flood, fire, wind, gravity, are for us or against us indifferently.  And yet the earth is here, garlanded with the seasons and riding in the celestial currents like a ship in calm summer seas, and man is here with all things under his feet.  All is well in our corner of the universe.  The great mill has made meal of our grist and not of the miller.  We have taken our chances and have won.  More has been for us than against us.  During the little segment of time that man has been upon the earth, only one great calamity that might be called cosmical has befallen it.  The ice age of one or two hundred thousand years was such a calamity.  But man survived it.  The spring came again, and life, the traveler, picked itself up and made a new start.  But if he had not survived it, if nothing had survived it, the great procession would have gone on just the same; the gods would have been just as well pleased.

The battle is to the strong, the race is to the fleet.  This is the order of nature.  No matter for the rest, for the weak, the slow, the unlucky, so that the fight is won, so that the race of man continues.  You and I may fail and fall before our time; the end may be a tragedy or a comedy.  What matters it?  Only some one must succeed, will succeed.

We are here, I say, because, in the conflict of forces, the influences that made for life have been in the ascendant.  This conflict of forces has been a part of the process of our development.  We have been ground out as between an upper and a nether millstone, but we have squeezed through, we have actually arrived, and are all the better for the grinding—­all those who have survived.  But, alas for those whose lives went out in the crush!  Maybe they often broke the force of the blow for us.